Syndication could be friendlier to non Django templating languages

[andy@…]

To specify the title or description for a feed, the syndication module will accept a path to a template:

"You can also change the names of these two templates by specifying title_template and description_template as attributes of your Feed class."
​http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/syndication/

This makes it a little unfriendly to non Django templating languages since it will use the loader defined in Django. It would be nice if it took a template object and rendered that, as opposed to using a string, using the default Django loader and rendering the template. This would allow me to easily use my templating language in my feed module, without interfering with the underlying module.

Django-0.95.1

contrib/syndication/feeds.py:

try:

description_tmp = loader.get_template(self.description_template_name)

except TemplateDoesNotExist:

description_tmp = Template('{{ obj }}')

[Rob Hudson <treborhudson@…>]

Or similar to the feed title and description, have the ability for the subclass to create methods of "item_title" or "item_description". I created a patch that will allow the user to add these methods that return a Template object.

[Rob Hudson <treborhudson@…>]

Patch against trunk. I can add docs if this looks good.

[Rob Hudson <treborhudson@…>]

Cleaned up, tested override and default, and added docs.

[sf]

Another approach to solve that problem.

[sf]

The previous patch takes a slightly different approach than the two patches already submitted. In fact, it takes the same approach as the other syndication fields: item_title() and item_description() methods are responsible for fetching the content of both fields, and by default it will fetch a template or use {{ obj }}. Thus, one is free to override those to use its own templating or to just provide the value without having to use a template.

I think this is fine since often, those method would just be:

   def item_title(self, item):
      return item.title
   def item_description(self, item):
      return item.contents

Note that the current patch doesn't include docs, and that the "current_site" argument for the template has been lost in the process. It can be reintroduced though.

[Seemant Kulleen]

This would help me, personally, in the case of syndication feeds on the new comment model. The unicode() function in comments makes the title of each comment into the first 50 words of the comment itself. I'd prefer to override that in the feed (akin to the old 0.96 behaviour of "By <author> on <date>" instead.

[Stephen Burrows]

The methods described above were added with changeset r12338, which moved syndication to class-based views. This means that anyone who wants to use an alternate template language can just override the method and do whatever they want.